A record of the highs and lows of a man looking at life with people without a drink in his hand

Monday, 21 December 2009

First meeting

I had my first meeting with the adviser today, and it went okay. I'm not going to say very much yet since it was literally only an hour ago and I need a lot more time to think about things first. In the space of an hour though we covered quite a bit, much of it a repitition of what was said at the first appointment, but the odd comment here and there gave me food for thought. Most importantly it dispelled the lingering fear I had that it would be totally futile; even on the steps towards the door, I was thinking I surely sit somewhere in that horrible middle bracket of people with problems that are neither too extreme to warrant a bluntly extreme response nor too bland to warrant solution by rote, instead sitting somewhere on a vague middle line of irritating uncertainty for all concerned. However, the effect of the meeting was to remind me that sometimes I take my self-perception too factually and that other people can have useful input now and then.

From what I gathered it will be a fairly informal thing, just an hour or so of talking and trying to understand the causes of my thoughts and behaviour. That was pretty much exactly what I was looking for since for so many years I've hardly ever spoken about any of this and even until very recently I've been keeping things secret because of the damage that being honest does to the rest of your life. Even now, you can tell I still have doubts about whether anyone else can help me - my instinct (as with everything else in life) is that if I need a job doing, I'm best doing it myself, so I have a resistance to asking for help from anyone. I think she understood the benefit of me being able to be free to talk without it coming back to make things worse, though. There'll be analysis of the problems and the patterns and aims for the future; that kind of thing. I didn't have a long time to explain why I was there, so the message I got across was that in the last five years or so, my whole social life has become entwined with drinking and now I feel both trapped and lost whenever I try to cut back or stop - and that's something she understood straight away, so it's a start. From what I briefly mentioned about how hectic my social life is at work and home I think I sounded like an international playboy so the stuff about how I drink to overcome shyness will have to be a surprise for another day.

My one real hope from it all is to know the truth about the way I am. I have my own views about what I do but I don't know other people's and I certainly don't know those of people who work with alcoholics every day; there must be something I can learn from them that'll help me in future.

The German trip went okay, in terms of drinking. I could have done a lot better, I could have done a lot worse. I suppose it depends very much upon what better and worse are, and I think one of the problems here is that my perceptions of that very often collide with other peoples'. I must get far too wrapped up in my self-analysis sometimes to see what my behaviour looks like to other people because I'm sometimes baffled by how I'm told I looked compared to what was going on in my head. That's getting off the subject and into the realms of analysing the sober me, though.

Christmas will be a funny one, I'm sure. I'm not entering into making predictions and binding myself to obligations, because I know for sure that it's in my character to rebel and that includes against myself. It seems better then to just go with the flow and try my best. I'm not going on a few things I normally do, but the lessons of the last few weeks are that even then I can still come close to ruining things, so I'll just have to keep biding my time until the next meeting.

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About Me

Brian Ferry stated that love is a drug. What he neglected to mention is that alcohol is also a drug and trying to sit the two down over dinner results in a scene from Reservoir Dogs in my head. This is my attempt to record what freeing myself from beer is like.